Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things appeared only a year after Jameson’s foundational book on postmodernism. And, while it is not likely that Gray was somehow reacting to Jameson’s vision of the political impotence of postmodern fiction, there are many ways in which Poor Things, read through Jameson, becomes precisely the sort of political postmodernism that Jameson envisioned as a future possibility. Gray’s novel is a complex, highly fragmented and metafictional work much of which is constructed via the overt pastiche of a number of nineteenth-century literary predecessors, especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Frankenstein, as we note elsewhere in this volume, has proved to be a rich source of material for postmodern novels with political implications, including Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019)[1]. Indeed, Gray also conducts, in Poor Things, an effective critique of capitalism from a socialist perspective, while displaying a strong sense of history that contains significant utopian energies. That Poor Things also relates to issues other than capitalism and history—most notably gender expectations, but also including such issues as Scottish nationalism (for) and American exceptionalism (against)—is not a distraction but only strengthens its ability to function as a political form of postmodernism.
The Postmodernity of Poor Things
Gray came to the writing of Poor Things already in possession of substantial credentials as a postmodern writer. His first novel, Lanark (1981), often occupies a prominent place in discussions of the postmodern fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, the “high” postmodernism that inspired such early studies as Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987). Indeed, the overtly metafictional concern with generating action on multiple levels of “reality” (what McHale calls “ontological levels”) makes Lanark a superb example of McHale’s vision of the concerns of high postmodernist texts. Lanark also well illustrates McHale’s suggestion of a significant intersection between postmodernism and science fiction, something that McHale himself points out in both Postmodernist Fiction and its follow-up, Constructing Postmodernism (1992). At the same time, both Lanark (with its complex and difficult other-worldliness) and Gray’s 1984 novel, 1982, Janine (with its prominent use of pornography as a narrative device), whatever critical recognition they might have received, were literary provocations clearly not exactly designed to attract a broad, popular audience. Meanwhile, the political projects that inform both of these texts already tended to separate them a bit from most high postmodern texts. Churchman thus grants that Lanark seems a classic case of postmodern style but argues that it is (mostly) not postmodern because of its commitment to the “socialist humanist tradition” (76). From our point of view, of course, what Churchman is describing is the fact that Gray’s writing was already trending toward a political form of postmodernism, even as early as Lanark[2].
Pittin exaggerates a bit when she states that Poor Things “was universally greeted as being a departure from post-modernism,” at least as previously practiced by Gray (208). However, at first glance, the clearly political agenda of Poor Things would certainly seem to set it apart from the kind of apolitical postmodernism described by Jameson. Indeed, there are good reasons to associate Poor Things with the kinds of marginal culture that Jameson has typically seen as an alternative to postmodernism. There might some question, of course, whether Gray’s Scottish perspective is as marginal as Jameson means in his description of phenomena such as gay literature and working-class rock music, though it is certainly off-center with respect to mainstream British culture. Indeed, Gray was very much a Scottish nationalist, in addition to a socialist, giving his work a vaguely postcolonial orientation[3]. Much of the criticism of Poor Things has focused on this dimension of the novel, as when both McMillan and Rhind have argued that Poor Things should be read as a Scottish national allegory (McMillan 1995, and Rhind 2011). In such readings, Bella is artificially constructed (in physical form by Baxter, in narrative form by McCandless) by men, though she ultimately escapes the bounds of their expectations, much as Gray appears to hope Scotland can do in relation to England. Stirling also sees Bella as an embodiment of Scotland, though she puts more emphasis on gender. In all these cases, importantly, Poor Things appears aligned with Jameson’s suggestion that “third-world” literature should generally be read in this allegorical manner.
Granted, this novel is quite different from any of Gray’s previous novels, but not in ways that would preclude it from being considered to be postmodern. If it seems contradictory that Poor Things might be both postmodern and a national allegory (which, for Jameson, is the antithesis of postmodernism), that might be because it is a new kind of postmodernism. It is, in short, an example of Jameson’s own notion of a “political form of postmodernism”— or at least a harbinger of this form that would become more prominent in the twenty-first century, making Poor Things a sort of transitional text.
In fact, the postmodern form of Poor Things is quite overt, as is its political stance. Gray’s novel is constructed as a sort of Menippean compilation of three different documents (plus a relatively brief editor’s introduction). What one might consider to be the “main” narrative is a memoir entitled Episodes from the Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer, supposedly written by Glasgow physician Dr. Archibald McCandless (1862–1911) and privately published by him in 1909[4]. The only surviving copy of this book is recovered from the refuse heap decades later by a friend of one “Alasdair Gray,” who edits it with minor changes to make it more attractive to a modern audience. This memoir tells how Bella was created by McCandless’s mentor, Frankensteinian mad surgeon Godwin Baxter, hoping eventually to make her his bride[5]. In particular, Baxter resurrects the body of a pregnant woman who had committed suicide by drowning but transplants the brain of her nine-month-old fetus into her body, giving her a fresh start in life. Naming his creation Bella, Baxter then begins to teach her so that she can develop into mental and emotional maturity and eventually become his wife, Baxter apparently being too grotesque in appearance to get a wife any other way[6]. Baxter then employs McCandless to help with Bella’s education, but then McCandless falls in love with Bella and is (with Baxter’s reluctant blessing) betrothed to her himself, only to have her run away with local cad Duncan Wedderburn, who takes her on a sex-fueled tour of Europe and the Mediterranean as she begins to explore the potentials of her brain and body, while the brain and body gradually learn to work together. Eventually, Bella returns to Glasgow and rejoins McCandless (after a number of complications, including the reappearance of her first husband, who originally drove her to suicide), then goes on to become Dr. Victoria McCandless.
The narrative in this memoir already includes a number of postmodern textual strategies in its own right. Much of the information about Bella’s trip with Wedderburn is supplied via letters sent back to Baxter and McCandless from either Bella or Wedderburn, but Bella’s accounts do not always match that of Wedderburn. This epistolary dimension of the text echoes the form of the original Frankenstein, of course, though in a much more complex (and postmodern) way.For example, we can also trace the development and maturation of Bella’s intellect through the evolving style of her letters, which began in the barely literate style of a pre-schooler, then gradually becomes more sophisticated—somewhat like the evolving style of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which follows the maturation of Stephen Dedalus via a form of indirect free style (as he is not the narrator). Poor Things goes far beyond Portrait in its use of this motif, though, even providing us with examples of Bella’s evolving penmanship. Meanwhile,Bella also feeds her developing intellect through reading and eventually even begins to write in iambic pentameter, mimicking the style of Shakespeare, until she stops because it is too much work and “slows me down” (115).
If Gray, via Bella, thus produces a pastiche of Shakespeare, this pastiche is far more than the postmodern pastiche as blank parody noted by Jameson. Shakespeare might be considered, after all, the national poet of England (and, by extension, of the British Empire), so for a Scottish writer to engage in a dialogue with him has inherent political potential[7]. For one thing, if Bella can write like Shakespeare, how great can Shakespeare really be? Meanwhile, the political potential of Gray’s dialogue with Shakespeare is subtly realized in one of Bella’s letters in which she describes an encounter with a Russian she met while on her travels with Wedderburn. In this encounter, the Russian relates to Bella his theory of the importance of a national literature. “A nation is only as old as its literature,” he tells her, then goes on to argue that Russia only became a true nation with the emergence of Pushkin, whom he describes as being roughly a contemporary of “your Walter Scott.” Then he argues that Bella’s country (obviously referring to the U.K., making no distinction between Scottish literature and English literature) is much older, thanks to the fact that “you had Shakespeare centuries before Walter Scott” (116). Bella claims to have known very little about literature at the time, but she tries to explain to the Russian that Robert Burns was a great Scottish poet even before Scott and that Shakespeare was English. Unfortunately, she goes on to say, the Russian “could not grasp the difference between Scotland and England” (166). The implication is clearly that Shakespeare’s lofty reputation tends to obscure the achievements of Scottish writers such as Burns and Scott, contributing to the subaltern status of Scotland with respect to England[8].
Meanwhile, while there are contradictory elements within McCandless’s memoir, that memoir is followed by even more contradictory elements. In particular, Poor Things next includes a “Letter to Posterity,” supposedly written by Victoria McCandless after the death of her husband Archibald. Victoria’s letter is specifically designed to undercut the main narrative in her husband’s memoir, declaring it to be almost entirely fictional. Meanwhile, she undermines her deceased husband even further by noting that she did not destroy the only surviving copy of his memoir because “it is almost the only evidence left that the poor fool existed” (251). And, according to editor Gray’s notes, she once granted that Archibald’s support had helped her in her prominent and successful medical career by noting that he had been “a very good wife” (303). She does, though, stipulate that the memoir be kept under seal until August 1974, by which time she assumes any living descendants would be distant enough not to be embarrassed by Archibald’s tale.
Among other things, Victoria’s letter calls attention to the pastiche construction of her husband’s memoir, suggesting (as evidence of its fictionality) that it has been cribbed from a variety of nineteenth-century literary sources. Victoria identifies a relatively obscure 1895 text by James Hogg entitled The Suicide’s Grave as perhaps the most important source of “episodes and phrases” in her husband’s narrative (292). She does go on to acknowledge the obvious case of Shelley’s Frankenstein as a clear influence, though, along with Edgar Allan Poe and a long list of works of “morbid Victorian fantasy, including such things as Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Alice through the Looking Glass, and Ryder Haggard’s She. For good measure, Gray adds Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913) and the 1890s scientific romances of H. G. Wells to the list of literary sources from which her husband seems to have borrowed plot elements (and even wording) for his narrative.
Importantly, though it seems accurate to describe the memoir as having been constructed via a mode of postmodern pastiche, this pastiche is not as inert as the postmodern pastiche that has been so influentially discussed by Jameson. For one thing, the Victorian texts drawn upon in Poor Things are not treated in the nostalgic mode that often appears in evocations of the Victorian era and that Jameson typically associates with postmodernism. As Victoria (whose very naming is slightly subversive of Victorian nostalgia[9]) puts it, describing Archibald’s use of Victorian sources in his memoir, “My second husband’s story positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth. … What morbid Victorian fantasy has he NOT filched from?” (272–73). Even Mary Shelley is not treated with particular reverence, though she, Poe, Shaw, and Wells are mentioned apart from Victoria’s critique of Victorian fantasies as morbid.
The pastiche in Gray’s Poor Things works less like Jameson’s postmodern blank parody and more like Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterization of parody as “an intentional dialogized hybrid. Within it, languages and styles actively and mutually illuminate one another” (76). Indeed, Poor Things does engage in dialogue with the whole Victorian era and its social practices, though its most important dialogue with a specific predecessor text is the one with the pre-Victorian Frankenstein, while Baxter’s experiments with animals quite obviously recall Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Importantly, both Frankenstein and Moreau are cautionary tales of scientific overreach—so much so that both spill over from science fiction into horror. However, Victor Frankenstein, having created his “monster,” immediately abandons it so that it is cast out into the world alone and parentless. Moreau is downright abusive toward his experimental subjects, especially the “puma woman,” ultimately leading to his death. There is a sense, though, in which Poor Things directly reverses both of these stories: however questionable his original intentions, Baxter is, by comparison, a responsible and ethical scientist who adopts a nurturing attitude toward his creation, enabling her eventually to have a successful life. Ultimately, partly thanks to Baxter’s upbringing (aided by McCandless), Bella can be considered a successful creation, as opposed to the ultimately destructive creations of Frankenstein and Moreau. Thus, Bella’s relatively successful outcome converts the cautionary tales of Frankenstein and Moreau into a utopian tale of the promise of science—which, in this case, not only defeats death but also overcomes the shackles of Victorian ideology and gender role rigidity to produce a woman who thinks clearly and rationally, as well as compassionately and unselfishly, while also becoming a trailblazer and a role model for other women.
To complicate the internal dialogue of Poor Things even further, the third main section of the novel, entitled “Notes Critical and Historical,” is compiled by editor Gray (apparently in July 1992), complementing his introduction. Clearly, editor Gray is not necessarily exactly identical to author Gray, and the latter even has a bit of good-natured fun at the expense of the former, who is described in a biographical note at the end of the novel as “a fat, balding, asthmatic, married pedestrian who lives by writing and designing things” (318). Nevertheless, this motif essentially involves the appearance of a version of a real author as a fictional character within the pages of his own novel, something that McHale sees as a characteristic postmodern fiction gesture. In particular, such appearances, according to McHale, are instances of the postmodern jumbling of ontological levels that he refers to as “frame-breaking” (Postmodernist Fiction 197).
The editor’s notes clarify some aspects of Archibald’s memoir, while also making it clear that the editor sides with Archibald. For example, the editor seeks in his notes to support Archibald’s account (which he claims to believe to be authentic), providing documentation that seems designed to defend Archibald’s story against Victoria’s critique of that story as being clearly fictional. On the other hand, despite the editor’s support for Archibald, Victoria’s down-to-earth story certainly seems more believable as a whole than Archibald’s account of weird Victorian science. Unfortunately, some of Victoria’s own details are demonstrably false, as when she reminds us (supposedly writing on August 1, 1914) that H. G. Wells had just published, that July, a novel entitled The War in the Air in which he envisions a large-scale, devastating war in the 1920s or 1930s in which the Western world would be bombed into “a worse state than the Australian aborigines” (275). Victoria, though, expresses her confidence that there will be no such war and that a better (socialist) future is coming, once the workers of the world unite and thwart the plans of the powers-that-be to go to war (276).
It is seems chilling that Victoria would be so optimistic given what we know was about to happen with regard to the war, especially as editor Gray informs us in his notes that Victoria’s two younger (of three) sons immediately joined the army after the war began—and were quickly killed. In historical reality Austro-Hungary had already declared war on July 28, and the declarations of war would be spreading across Europe—including Great Britain—by August 4. Victoria is thus writing in the midst of the outbreak of the war. However, the status of Victoria’s ending is completely called into question by the fact that her account of Wells’ novel contains important inaccuracies. Wells did publish a novel entitled The War in the Air, and it did indeed envision a future war in which aircraft play a leading role, leading to the collapse of Western civilization. However, the novel’s ending is somewhat more optimistic than Victoria indicates, envisioning that civilization will be rebuilt. Perhaps more importantly, The War in the Air was published in 1908, not in July 1914, which makes its vision a bit less strikingly related to the outbreak of World War I than Victoria implies.
This inaccuracy would seem to provide a perfect opening for editor Gray to question the accuracy of Victoria’s accounts in general. Instead, he also states that The War in the Air was published a month before the outbreak of World War I, without even noting that Victoria also mentioned this novel (284). The fact that both Gray and Victoria misstate the date of the publication of Wells’ novel suggests that there is more at stake here than bad memory on the part of both of them—unless the editor was simply influenced by Victoria’s account and didn’t bother to check the facts, which would somewhat undermine his claim to be approaching the story as an “historian.” More likely, both of these misstatements of Wells’ publication date are simply a matter of postmodern play on the part of author Gray, thus reminding us to check our own sources of historical information. It is also possible, though, that all of the action of Poor Things simply takes place in an alternate past in which Wells’ novel was published in 1914, which would account, among other things, for the fact that Godwin Baxter, in Poor Things, has access to science and technology that did not, in fact, exist in the real world of the 1880s, when the action is set[10].
At first glance, the self-deconstructing nature of Poor Things, with its multiple contradicting documents and its obviously false story about its own origins, might seem to be an example of pure literary play. And it is certainly the case that Poor Things is an extremely playful text. At the same time, Gray’s overt attempt to undermine any definitive interpretation of his novel might again be read as an anti-capitalist gesture in the mode of the “dereification” associated by Jameson with Joyce’s Ulysses, a phenomenon we have already noted in connection with Pynchon’s Against the Day.[11] (Ulysses 132–33). In short, by refusing to settle into a fixed meaning, Poor Things, like Ulysses and Against the Day, refuses to be converted into a static object that can be consumed in the manner of any other commodity. In addition, as Glendening has argued, “despite its self-contradictions and ambiguities, the novel’s ideological investments stand out as its various textual dimensions work together to attack perceived political and economic oppressions” (76). Moreover, its conflicting possible interpretations support “the principle that, for protagonists and readers alike, truth is most likely to emerge from exposure to multiple points of view and the struggle to understand” (77).
The Politics of Poor Things
For Glendening, Poor Things qualifies as postmodern in form, but clearly deviates from most postmodern novels in the extent of its political engagement. In the case of Poor Things, any political implicationsof its form are significantly reinforced by especially overt, pro-socialist political content, which comes as no surprise given that Alasdair Gray was a writer with well-known leftist political beliefs. As summarized on the Socialist Worker website, “Gray never lost sight of his socialist leanings, and included the epigram ‘work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’ in many of his books. He loudly and publicly derided the erosion of the welfare state, and was an early supporter of Scottish independence” (Gearty)[12]. In particular, Gray uses the device of Bella’s innocence to provide a defamiliarizing view of most of this material. Her fresh brain has not undergone the kind of conditioning that an adult citizen of nineteenth-century Great Britain might be expected to have undergone, so that her perceptions are not distorted by the interpellating effects of Victorian bourgeois ideology.
Here, one thinks of one of the most famous passages in all of the monumental work of Karl Marx, in which he discusses the ultimate failure of the revolution that brought Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to power in France in 1848 to bring about genuine radical change, noting that, while people have a great deal of power to change the course of history, they are nevertheless limited by the inherited attitudes that restrict what it is possible even for them to imagine:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.” (Marx and Engels 1978, 555)
Bella’s new brain, though, is freed of the weight of those dead generations; her infant brain has had to mature virtually overnight; moreover, she has “grown up” in the strictly circumscribed environment of the home of Godwin Baxter, an environment that is dominated by the rationalist dictates of science and devoted to the pursuit of new frontiers of knowledge. Thus, injustices that seem to be natural or unavoidable—just “the way of the world”—to most people can be quite shocking to her and very difficult for her to accept. The most overt examples of this phenomenon have to do with gender and sexuality, partly because so much of the plot of the memoir section of the novel is devoted to Bella’s exuberant exploration of her sexuality and partly because Bella’s free-thinking attitude toward sex runs so directly contrary to the repressive norms of her Victorian society, which place such strict limitations on the kinds of sexual conduct that are deemed acceptable for “respectable” women.
However, Poor Things uses Bella’s innocent reactions to what she encounters as she travels the world as a wide-eyed picaro to comment on a number of other issues as well. For example, in one scene (with few things to read on shipboard) Bella innocently picks up a copy of Punch, the popular London satirical magazine (founded, in our world, in 1841), known for its racist depictions of Great Britain’s colonial subjects, especially in India, as in the inflammatory cartoons concerning the 1857 “Mutiny,” which contributed both to the magazine’s popularity and to popular hysteria concerning that event. In one of her letters back to Baxter and McCandless, Bella describes the magazine, noting that
the pictures showed many kinds of people. The ugliest and most comical are Scots, Irish, foreign, poor, servants, rich folk who have been poor until very recently, small men, old unmarried women and Socialists. The Socialists are ugliest, very dirty and hairy with weak chins, and seem to spend their time grumbling to other people at street corners. (127)
Bella doesn’t know enough to be scandalized by these unfair depictions, though she clearly is a bit puzzled by them. For example, she doesn’t know what to make of the magazine’s negative depictions of socialists because she doesn’t even know what a socialist is. She thus asks Wedderburn what socialists are, and he cynically informs her that they are “fools who think the world should be improved” (128). When she asks whether this means there is something wrong with the world, Wedderburn simply grumbles that socialists themselves are what is wrong.
Given the novel’s depiction of Wedderburn as a cad and exploitative egoist, such a criticism seems like a positive endorsement of socialism—especially when one considers the fact that Gray himself is a known socialist. Socialism also comes in for criticism from Harry Astley, the hyper-cynical Englishman Bella meets on the ship. For Astley, “human life is an essentially painful disease which only death can cure” (156). Predictably, given this view, Astley is also convinced that any attempt to deploy resources to help the poor and the working class will essentially be wasted. He is thus perfectly happy, not only that Great Britain has become wealthy by plundering much of the rest of the globe but that they have used this wealth to build a stronger military and police, as well as more jails to house the unruly poor and prevent them from causing trouble in the streets (158). He is indeed skeptical of all programs to reform society on a more just basis, believing that the status quo in Great Britain is the best we can hope for. On balance, Astley advises Bella that her best chance to do good in the world is to marry him and then work to improve conditions on his extensive estate as a sort of hobby.
By this time, though, Bella is already growing more sophisticated, so she finds Astley’s arguments entirely unconvincing and his proposal entirely unattractive. Instead, she concludes that she must become a socialist, because that will give her the best chance to contribute to making conditions better for everyone. After she and Wedderburn make their way to Paris, short of funds, Bella decides to become a prostitute in order to support herself, clearly feeling that sex workers are like any other workers and completely lacking any Victorian sense such work might be degrading for a woman. Meanwhile, her best friend among the workers in the bordello at which she goes to work is one Toinette, who is herself a socialist, and by this time comes as no surprise that Bella responds enthusiastically to Toinette’s point of view.
This positive view of socialism is carried over into Victoria’s letter, in which she reveals that she is, indeed, a socialist and a member of the Fabian Society, as well as being a pioneer among women in the medical profession. Of course, her confidence on the eve of World War I that the socialist movement will be able to avert the conflict serves as an acknowledgement that this movement has, as yet, had very limited success in implementing its agenda in Great Britain. Indeed, in his notes, editor Gray incorporates a letter, supposedly written shortly after the Labour victory in the 1945 British general elections, in which Victoria is again unrealistically optimistic about the possibility of a coming socialist future (316–17). And, if this reminder of the oft-thwarted hopes of Britain’s socialists seems at odds with Gray’s mantra that one should “work as if you live in the early days of a better nation,” then we should perhaps remember that the emphasis here might well be on the early, which suggests considerable room for future progress.[13] Moreover, the ultimate undecidability of so many aspects of this novel give it an open-ended character that is quite consistent with the notion that history is contingent and that many different futures are possible.
Perhaps the most striking moment in Bella’s political education occurs when, at the behest of the American physician and evangelist Dr. Hooker, whom she meets in the course of her travels, she pays a visit to the slums of Alexandria, Egypt. Bella, having no idea of the kinds of poverty and misery experienced by many people in the world, is shocked and appalled by the conditions she sees in the slums of Alexandria. This experience is an important one on Bella’s road to becoming a socialist. It also makes an important anticolonial point. While this point is not made explicitly in Poor Things, the horrifying conditions Bella sees in Alexandria have come about partly because the city was recently shelled by the British navy, something that Hooker calls attention to in the midst of a debate with Astley. When Astley argues that the recent British takeover of Egypt was necessitated by an economic need to control the Suez Canal, for which they paid the French, who had previously controlled the canal, Hooker responds, “You also shelled Alexandria.” Astley defends that shelling by noting, “They were arming it against us and we needed their canal” (137).
Astley’s calm assumption that it is okay for the British to take control of any region in the world that they find necessary to their needs is in itself telling. Meanwhile, this reminder of the violence with which British imperial control was often extended is also important. As it turns out, the British shelling of Alexandria in July 1882, designed to thwart the rise of nationalist opposition to the British-friendly khedive Tawfik Pasha, was extremely damaging, including the fact that as much as roughly one in three of the shells fired missed their nominally military targets and landed in civilian areas of the city, much of which was devastated. The shelling was followed by panic and looting, whereupon the British occupied the city and razed many of the damaged buildings on the grounds that they were unsafe[14]. According to editor Gray’s introduction, Bella was created by Baxter near the end of February 1881, while General Aubrey “Thunderbolt” Blessington—Bella’s first husband—committed suicide in December 1883, so that all of Bella’s experiences during the memoir occur between those two dates. Bella would thus presumably be visiting Alexandria quite soon after the shelling, though it is never possible to rely entirely on any information we are given in this novel.
Hooker, incidentally, plays another key role in the political messaging of Poor Things, standing as a sort of spokesperson for Americanism and reminding us that the United States was already beginning to extend its global influence as long ago as the early 1880s. In particular, Hooker reveals himself to be a committed white supremacist whose evangelical efforts around the world are designed to bring enlightenment to the inferior races. For him, conditions in the world are generally improving because the “Anglo-Saxon race … have begun to control the world, and we are the cleverest and kindliest and most adventurous and most truly Christian and hardest working and most free and democratic people who have ever existed” (139). Moreover, lest there be any doubt that Anglo-Saxon superiority is due to innate racial characteristic, rather than to cultural factors, he goes on to explain that the Anglo-Saxons are intellectually and morally superior because god has chosen to give them “bigger brains” than other races, so that, in relation to the rest of the world, “we are like teachers in a playground of children who do not want to know that the school exists” (139). In addition, if Hooker is confident in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, he is also an American exceptionalist who believes that the U.S. is uniquely positioned to exploit its racial advantages. He thus asks, “Who can doubt that, before the end of the twentieth century, the United States will dominate the rest of the planet?” (140).
Given Hooker’s racist attitudes, it is fairly clear that his motivation in encouraging Bella to visit Alexandria is not intended to convince her to sympathize with the people of the city so much as it is intended to demonstrate to her that societies that are not dominated by white Christians are likely to be radically dysfunctional. Of course, Hooker is perfectly well aware that the baleful conditions in Alexandria have largely been caused by the British, so it is clear either that he is being dishonest or that his thinking is clouded by his prejudices—or perhaps a bit of both. In any case, his reprehensible attitudes clearly undercut both his religiosity and his American boosterism, suggesting that both run contrary to the supposed benevolence of Christianity and the supposedly democratic inclinations of Americanism.
British colonialism also comes in for a great deal of criticism in various places in Poor Things, though the principal representative of the British colonialist mentality is General Blessington, a former commander of colonial armies known for the extreme severity with which he put down resistance to British rule in places such as India and Africa (and for being wounded numerous times). As his credentials (listed in an extract from the 1883 edition of Who’s Who), Blessington had seen extensive service throughout the empire, though, by the time of the action of the novel in the 1880s, he has largely fallen out of favor because of his extreme tactics (206–7). Presented as a lout and as something of a buffoon, Blessington serves almost as a one-man deconstruction of the notion of enlightened British colonial rule. Importantly, however, he is also walking personification of patriarchal attitudes, his treatment of his wife Victoria having driven her to suicide (leading to the creation of Bella in the first place). Moreover, when he interrupts the wedding of Bella and McCandless in order to claim Bella as his own, his attitude of ownership is quite clear. His intention to have a clitoridectomy performed on his wife further demonstrates his attitude, as does his eventual attempt to shoot Baxter in order to claim possession of Bella. The implication of his portrayal is clear: not only are colonialism and patriarchy both reprehensible, but both are informed by the same drive for domination and control.
This drive for domination and control is, of course, precisely the attitude that was famously associated with Enlightenment reason by Horkheimer and Adorno, who argued that the “knowledge is power” motto of Enlightenment science was literal and that this science was purely instrumental, interested in using science to gain power over nature (and over other people), rather than to gain understanding. This instrumental science is the kind practiced by scientists such as Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and Wells’ Dr. Moreau, who are clearly interested in gaining godlike powers of creation more than genuine knowledge and understanding. On the other hand, Godwin Baxter, despite his “God” nickname, seems genuinely interested in advancing scientific knowledge and in using that knowledge to make the world a better place. This attitude is then passed on to Bella, who (thanks to her unique background) is even better able to break free of the thinking of the past. Thus, as Glendening notes, the novel ultimately proposes an ethical and humane science as an alternative to theistic, dogmatic, institutionalized religion. For him, Poor Things separates ethics from institutionalized religion and its dogmas while advocating morally committed science, operating not for its own sake or that of any power structure but instead driven by dedication to human welfare (90).
Blessington was Victoria’s first husband, but he is not the first patriarch in her life. When Blessington shows up to prevent Bella’s wedding, he is accompanied by one Blaydon Hattersley, Victoria’s father and the managing director of the “Union Jack Steam Traction Company of Manchester and Birmingham” (202). In short, Hattersley is an industrial capitalist, who (we eventually learn, to the extent we can rely on any information provided in this novel) struck it rich by acquiring control of a valuable patent when young Victoria was three years old. Until then, he had worked as a foreman, treating his wife and children, we are told, “like he treated the workmen: as potential enemies who must be kept poor by violence or the threat of it. He thought any remark which did not obviously flatter him was rebellion” (255–56). After striking it rich, Hattersley eventually moved his family into much more upscale housing and supplied them with servants but continued to regard his wife and daughter as his subalterns, treating them abusively. In short, just as the novel’s depiction of Blessington reveals the parallels between colonialism and patriarchy, its depiction of Hattersley demonstrates the parallels between patriarchy and capitalism: colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy are all based on the hierarchical notion that some kinds of people (British, white, male, wealthy) are inherently superior to and should have power over other kinds of people (including those who are colonial subjects, nonwhite, female, or working-class).
Once he realizes that Bella will not conform to his expectations, Hattersley disavows her, declaring that she is no daughter of his (239). Bella, of course, lacks the conditioning that would make her controllable, and so she has thwarted Blessington’s desires as well, leading to his suicide only days later, just as her resistance to control had earlier undone Wedderburn. Having been driven insane by Bella’s refusal to adhere to his conceptions of proper feminine behavior, Wedderburn retreats into religion and attempts to explain his downfall as the work of Satan, declaring Baxter to be the Antichrist. Suggesting that Biblical prophecies point toward the British Empire as the modern Babylon, he also notes that Glasgow can be considered the true birthplace of the British Empire, given that it was in Glasgow that James Watt invented the steam engine that powered the rise of the empire, that Adam Smith developed the first theoretical view of the workings of capitalism, and that William Thomson (better known in the history of science as “Lord Kelvin”) developed the telegraph cables that enabled communication across the empire (96).
That these points are made within the religious ravings of a madman might be a bit problematic, but Wedderburn’s descriptions of the contributions of Watt, Smith, and Thomson are accurate. One might compare here the depiction, in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), of Manchester as the birthplace of both modern industrial capitalism and working-class opposition to capitalist exploitation. In both Gray’s novel and Winterson’s, a key point is thus that the conventional view of London as the focal point of capitalist modernization through the nineteenth century is a simplification that ignores important and varied contributions from a range of sources in a variety of places.[15]
Ultimately, Poor Things is informed by a strong historical sense that reminds us that many futures are possible. Astley, for example, seems to feel that no real positive change is possible, so that any attempt to improve future conditions will likely only make them worse. Hooker, on the other hand, is a strong believer in historical progress, but his definition of progress involves the growing global hegemony of the Christian religion and the Anglo-Saxon race, with the United States leading the way. Archibald McCandless is clearly a big believer in scientific progress, which he notes in his memoir “accelerates from year to year” (244). Tellingly, it is Bella who is most optimistic about the possibility of social progress. Having been given a brain that has been freed of the weight of all those dead generations, she not only hopes for a bright socialist future but is able to imagine that future as a genuine possibility.
As Winterson makes especially clear in Frankissstein, one of the key reasons to draw upon the Frankenstein narrative is the sense that the original novel is set at a key moment in history when industrial capitalism is just beginning to arise, after a century or more of ideological modernization that accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie as the new ruling class in Britain. Poor Things is set more than half a century later, after considerable evolution of the British capitalist system, but it is also set at a time when that system itself is on the verge of dramatic changes that will eventually see the rise of a new consumerist form of capitalism, propelling that system into a future of globalization and, eventually, neoliberalism. Indeed, the novel is infused with the sense that its world is at an historical turning point, with cataclysmic changes on the horizon, marked in particularly spectacular form by World War I, which is beginning even as Victoria writes her letter.
Poor Things is ultimately positive about the potential for both science and socialism to contribute to the building of a better and more just future. It also provides some specific criticism of the particular ills that this future would overcome, including inequities based on race, class, gender, culture, and religion. Bella Baxter is the key to this vision; gifted with a new brain freed of the prejudices and preconceptions of the past, she is able clearly to see the injustices in her Victorian world and to envision a way beyond those injustices. Moreover, the postmodern form of the novel contributes to this political vision, employing a form of pastiche that engages in genuinely productive dialogue with literary sources such as Frankenstein and Shakespeare that reinforces the political message of its content. At the same time, the novel’s resistance to interpretive closure not only serves as a refusal to be consumed like a commodity but also as a warning that there is no fixed path into the future and that the utopian historical direction indicated in the novel can occur only if people work to make it happen.
Works Cited
Boland, Stephanie. “Alasdair Gray’s Literary Socialism.” Prospect Magazine, 12 July 2019, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/42772/alasdair-grays-literary-socialism. Accessed 26 March 2024.
Booker, M. Keith. Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics. University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Booker. M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. “Lifting the Weight of the Dead Generations: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023) and the Political Form of (Weird) Postmodernism.”
Churchman, Georgia Walker. “(Scottish) Critic Fodder: On Why Alasdair Gray’s Lanark Isn’t a Nationalist or a Postmodernist Text, Mostly.” Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 55, no. 1, 2019, pp. 75–89.
Gearty, Eliza. “The Colourful Life of Alasdair Gray.” Socialist Worker, 5 February 2020, https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/colourful-life-alasdair-gray/#:~:text=Gray%20never%20lost%20sight%20of,early%20supporter%20of%20Scottish%20independence. Accessed 26 March 2024.
Glendening, John. “Education, Science, and Secular Ethics in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things.” Mosaic, vol. 49, no. 2, June 2016, pp. 75-93.
Gray, Alasdair. Poor Things. 1992. First Mariner Books, 2023.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Pretexts, vol.3, nos. 1–2, 1991, pp. 82–104. Originally published in Social Text, vol. 15, Fall 1986, pp. 65–88.
Jameson, Fredric. “Ulysses in History.” James Joyce and Modern Literature. Edited by W. J. McCormack and Alistair Stead, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 126–41.
McGrath, Harry. 2013. “Early Days of a Better Nation.” Scottish Review of Books, 28 March 2013, https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/03/early-days-of-a-better-nation/. Accessed 4 March 2024.
McMillan, Dorothy. “Constructed Out of Bewilderment: Stories of Scotland.” Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. Edited by Ian A. Bell. University of Wales Press, 1995, pp. 80-99.
Pittin, Marie Odile. “Alasdair Gray: A Strategy of Ambiguity.” Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present. Ed. Susanne Hagemann. Frankfurt: Lang, 1996. 199–215.
Rhind, Neil. “A Portrait of Bella Caledonia: Reading National Allegory in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things.” International Journal of Scottish Literature, Issue 8, Autumn-Winter 2011, pp. 1–15.
Kirsten Stirling, “Imagined Bodies and the Landscape of Home: Woman as Nation in the Fiction of Alasdair Gray.” Terranglian Territories: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Literature of Region and Nation. Edited by Susanne Hagemann. Peter Lang, 2000, pp. 269–76.
Winterson, Jeanette. Frankissstein: A Love Story. Grove Atlantic, 2019.
Wright, William. A Tidy Little War: The British Invasion of Egypt, 1882. Spellmount, 2009.
Notes
[1] The Frankenstein story has been one of the most widely used motifs of the culture of the past century, often with clear political implications. Film adaptations have included both direct adaptations of Shelley’s writing (such as the films of James Whale) and inventive riffs on the motif (such as Alex Garland’s 2014 artificial intelligence film Ex Machina). Novels that employ the motif in inventive ways include such examples as Michael Bishop’s 1994 Brittle Innings (which combines the Frankenstein motif with minor league baseball and World War II–era social commentary) and Hernan Diaz’s 2017 In the Distance (which combines Frankenstein with a narrative of the “taming” of the American West).
[2] Jameson does not mention Gray in his 1991 postmodernism book, but then he shows relatively little interest there in high postmodern metafictional texts in general. For example, he barely mentions Thomas Pynchon and does not mention Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which comes as close as anything to being the central work of high postmodern fiction.
[3] See Gray’s pamphlet Independence: Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland, published the same year as Poor Things for an expression of his nationalist views.
[4] The Oscar-winning 2023 film version of the novel adapts only this main narrative. That McCandless would characterize it as containing episodes from his life (despite the fact that Bella’s experience is clearly the main focus of the narrative) suggests a masculinist self-absorption that even the relatively benevolent McCandless is unable to overcome.
[5] Baxter is thus both a father figure and a husband figure to Bella. The “Godwin” in his name is an obvious reference to William Godwin, the father of Mary Shelley. In addition, Baxter’s middle name, like that of Mary’s husband, the poet Percy Shelley, is “Bysshe,” so that Baxter’s name encompasses both of the illustrious men who were important in Mary’s life. Finally, Bella often refers to Godwin simply as “God,” which not only points to his role as her creator but also surely serves as a callback to Colin Clive’s famous declaration, as Henry Frankenstein,of his godlike stature in the 1931 Frankenstein.
[6] It is clear, on the basis of the memoir, that Baxter’s physical abnormalities are primarily the result of his own the scientific experiments on him conducted by his father, Sir Colin Baxter. It is less clear that we should take seriously the hint that Godwin might literally have been “manufactured” via the “Frankenstein method,” though it is obvious that Sir Colin is a scientist more in the mode of Victor Frankenstein than is his son (274).
[7] One might compare here Joyce’s (admittedly, more extensive) subversive dialogue with Shakespeare, especially in Ulysses (1922). See Booker for a discussion of the way Joyce treats the works of Shakespeare as “a major element of the ideological superstructure of the British Empire” (Joyce 142).
[8] Gray slyly undercuts Shakespeare in other places as well, as when, in Lanark, he describes Hamlet as a play in which “heavy paternalism forces a weak-minded youth into dread of existence, hallucinations and crime” (496).
[9] Victoria’s name also clerly refers to that of Victor Frankenstein.
[10] The status of Poor Things as a sort of alternate history narrative is emphasized even more in the film adaptation, which presents us with visual images of steampunk technologies (such as steam-driven carriages and overhead sky trams) that did not exist in the Victorian world of our history. On this film as a work of steampunk alternate history, see Booker and Daraiseh (“Lifting”).
[11] For another example of this phenomenon that might be seen as an especially overt critique of capitalism, one might consider Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Trust (2022), which similarly employs the conceit of conflicting accounts, including a wife’s account that undermines her husband’s earlier account, in this case specifically with regard to capitalist market manipulation.
[12] Also see Stephanie Boland’s article on/interview with Gray in Prospect magazine, tellingly entitled “Alasdair Gray’s Literary Socialism.”
[13] This phrase (with attribution to Gray) is even inscribed on the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament building. It was adapted as a personal slogan by Gray (who, late in his life, would substitute “world” for “nation”) from Canadian poet Dennis Lee’s 1968 poem “Civil Elegies,” which suggests that the best life would be to try to find a place “in the early days of a better civilization.” See McGrath (2013).
[14] On the 1882 British shelling and occupation of Alexandria, see Wright.
[15] From this point of view, it is probably unfortunate that the 2023 film adaptation of Poor Things centers its action in London, rather than Glasgow, though Willem Dafoe’s Baxter still speaks with a Scottish accent.